Beats Powerbeats Pro Truly Wireless Headphones Review

The Powerbeats Pro are fairly similar to the Beats Powerbeats3 Wireless or Beats Powerbeats 4, but are truly wireless and have a slightly sleeker design. They look like sports headphones, thanks to the ear-hooks, while still being fairly stylish. They come in a few different color schemes, but only the all-black are available at the time of writing. You’ll be able to get them in navy, moss, and ivory colors.

The Powerbeats Pro are comfortable in-ears that can be worn for a while without feeling too much fatigue. They're lightweight, and the ear-hooks are easily malleable to help you find a steadier and more comfortable fit. They don’t enter the ear canal as deeply as other traditional in-ears, and they also come with a few different tip sizes to help you find the best fit. Additionally, even if they have buttons on the back of the buds, they're very sensitive and you won’t need to push the headphones inside your ears even more, which can hurt. However, if you have glasses with thick arms, you may have difficulty fitting the ear-hooks around your ears. Overall, these sports headphones are comfortable enough for most workouts or runs.

The control scheme of the truly wireless Powerbeats Pro is very good. The Beats logo acts as a multi purpose button that gives you common functionalities. A single tap can play/pause your music or manage calls. You can also skip tracks or go backwards with double or triple taps, respectively. Also, you get a nice volume rocker on the top of the earbuds, which is easy to use. You can also trigger your device’s voice assistant with a long press of the multipurpose button. Additionally, all the commands can be triggered from either earpiece, which is great and makes them very easy to use. All controls are available and fully usable on Android devices, other than the ‘Hey Siri’ voice command. The Powerbeats also feature a smart pause, which will automatically start/stop your music when you take your headphones out or put them back in.

Like most in-ear headphones, the Powerbeats Pro are very breathable. Even if they have a bulkier design than more straightforward in-ears, they don’t trap much heat inside your ears, which shouldn’t make you sweat more than usual when working out. This makes them a good option for sports.

These headphones are very portable but are slightly bulkier than most truly wireless in-ears. They are easy to carry around as they fit in your pockets or a gym bag easily. They also come with a nice hard case, but it's bulky.

The Powerbeats Pro's hard case is good. It gives about 15 extra hours of battery life to the headphones, but you only have one battery indicator light, which doesn’t actually give you a good idea of the battery left. The case is also quite bulky. It can fit in larger pockets but since it's quite big, it will be visibly obvious. Also, the case doesn't completely close if you've made adjustments to the ear-hooks. However, the case is easy to carry around in a gym bag.

The Beats Powerbeats Pro are well-built truly wireless headphones, but don’t quite feel on-par with other premium headphones like the Sennheiser Momentum True Wireless or the Bang & Olufsen Beoplay E8 2.0 Truly Wireless 2019. They are made of plastic, which is lighter for sport activities. However, the ear-hooks feel a bit flimsy when moving them around. Like the Beats Fit Pro True Wireless, they're also only rated IPX4, which is fairly disappointing for high-end sports headphones. On the upside, they feel nice and look like premium headphones. They're dense enough to survive a few drops without suffering too much physical damage.

These headphones are very stable and will be a great option for most sports. Thanks to the ear-hook design, it’s practically impossible to lose them during a run or a workout, even with heavy head movement. They don’t move much inside your ears too, which means you don’t always have to reposition them during your training. If you want even more stable earbuds for working out, check out the Bose Sport Earbuds. If you prefer sports headphones without ear hooks, try the Jabra Elite 4 Active True Wireless.

• Beats Powerbeats Pro headphones
• 4x tip options
• Hard charging case
• USB-to-Lightning charging cable
• Manuals

Like most in-ear headphones, they have excellent frequency response consistency. Assuming the user is able to achieve a proper fit and an air-tight seal using the assortment of tips that come with the headphones, they should be able to get consistent bass and treble delivery every time they use the headphones.

The bass response of the Powerbeats Pro is remarkable. Their LFE (low-frequency extension) is down to 10Hz, which is excellent. This means these headphones are able to reproduce an adequate amount of the thump and rumble common to bass-heavy music. The response throughout the range is virtually flawless and follows our target curve accurately. This means the bass will be clear and won’t be overly done. If you prefer a more bass-heavy sound from your wireless Beats headphones, consider the Beats Flex Wireless.

The Powerbeats Pro have a great mid-range performance. The low-mid and mid-mid regions follow our target curve accurately. This results in an accurate reproduction of vocals and lead instruments. There’s a small 3dB bump in high-mid, which will add a bit of excess to the brightness and projection of vocals/leads, but this won’t be very noticeable.

The treble accuracy is okay. It's uneven but mostly underemphasized, making sounds in this range such as sibilants dull and lifeless. If you're looking for a similar-looking pair of ear-hook headphones but with a more accurate treble response, check out the Beats Powerbeats 4.

The stereo imaging of the Powerbeats Pro is very good. The weighted group delay is at 0.13, which is very good. The GD graph also shows that the group delay response never crosses the audibility threshold, suggesting a tight bass and a transparent treble reproduction. Additionally, the L/R drivers of our test unit were well-matched in amplitude, frequency, and phase response, which is important for the accurate placement and localization of objects (voices, instruments, video game effects) in the stereo image. However, note that these results are only valid for our unit and yours may perform differently.

The soundstage is poor. Since creating a large and speaker-like soundstage is partially dependent on having a speaker-like pinna activation, and in-ear headphones bypass the pinna and don't interact with it, their soundstage will be perceived to be small and located inside the listener's head. Their closed-back design also means that their soundstage won't feel as open as open-back earbuds like the Apple AirPods (2nd generation) Truly Wireless and the Bose SoundSport Free Truly Wireless.

The noise isolation performance of the Powerbeats Pro is poor. These in-ears don’t have active noise cancelling and only passively isolate. They practically don’t block any lower-end frequencies which means they won’t be great in public transit since they don’t do anything against the deep rumble of engines. In the mid-range, important for blocking out speech, they reduce ambient noise by about 6dB, which won’t be very noticeable. On the upside, they do a decent job against noises in the treble range, like sharp S and T sounds, and fan noises, like an A/C system, reducing the noise by about 22dB. For a better isolation performance, check out the noise cancelling Apple AirPods Pro Truly Wireless or the Klipsch T5 II True Wireless Sport instead.

The leakage performance of the Powerbeats Pro is decent. They don’t leak in the bass and mid ranges, resulting in a very thin-sounding leakage, mostly composed of sharp sounds from the treble range. The overall level of the leakage is not very loud either. With the music at 100dB SPL, the leakage at 1 foot away averages at 37dB SPL, but it peaks at 65dB, which is quite loud and over the noise floor of an average office.

The recording quality of the integrated microphone is mediocre. The LFE (low-frequency extension) of 193Hz means speech recorded/transmitted with this mic sounds noticeably thin. The HFE (high-frequency extension) of 3.4kHz results in speech that lacks detail and is noticeably muffled. However, this is a limitation of the Bluetooth protocol and most Bluetooth microphones will perform similarly.

The integrated microphone has a sub-par noise handling performance. In our SpNR test, it achieved a speech-to-noise ratio of 17dB, indicating that it's best suited for quiet and moderately loud environments, but it may struggle to fully separate speech from background noise in loud situations like a subway station.

The battery life of the Powerbeats Pro is great. We’ve measured over 11 hours of continuous playback on a single charge and this could even last you for a full work day, which is considerably longer than other truly wireless headphones we've tested. These headphones also took less than an hour to charge fully, which is amazing. Thanks to their case, you can get up to 24 hours of total playtime according to the specs sheet. They also automatically enter a standby mode when being idle for a while, but we couldn’t accurately measure the duration of the timer. Additionally, like the Apple AirPods (2nd generation) Truly Wireless, there is no master earbud, meaning you can put either the left or the right bud in the charging case and use the other one by itself. If you want similarly designed headphones that offer much better overall battery life, check out the Mpow Flame Pro.

These headphones don’t have an app per se, but iOS has a built-in interface for the Powerbeats Pro, just like with the Apple AirPods (2nd generation) Truly Wireless. It displays the battery status of the buds and the case, but this isn’t available on Android. This interface will pop up when syncing the Powerbeats Pro to an Apple device. However, you can’t remap controls like you can with the AirPods 2. On MacOS, you can also see the battery life information and connect via Bluetooth, but that’s about it.

These Bluetooth-only headphones support version 5.0 and, unlike the Beats Studio Buds True Wireless, have an H1 chip for seamless pairing with Apple devices. Unfortunately, they can’t be paired with multiple devices simultaneously, but have a very easy and quick pairing procedure even if they don’t support NFC, even with Android devices.

The Powerbeats Pro’s latency is about average for Bluetooth headphones. With 183ms of delay, they might not be the ideal choice for watching video content. However, our testing rig doesn’t take advantage of the H1 chip, which means your experience may be better on an iOS device. That said, if you're an Android user looking for a pair of sports-oriented truly wireless headphones, the Skullcandy Push Ultra Truly Wireless seem to experience far less latency on such systems.

These headphones can’t be used wired, as expected for truly wireless headphones.

The Powerbeats Pro come with a hard charging case that gives about 15 extra hours of battery life according to the specs sheet. The case doesn’t have any inputs and has to be charged with a Lightning cable, which is disappointing as a USB-C would have been better for most.